The Hummingbird's Daughter (32 page)

After ten days, Teresita reappeared in the big main doorway of Cabora’s central house. She blinked in the light of the courtyard. She had been locked in her room, sleeping, and silent when awake. They thought she had gone mad, or fallen into some wicked witchery. Gabriela and Tomás ran to greet her, but it was as if she were blind and could not see them.

“God spoke to me,” she said. “His voice is like the voice of a young man.”

Huila kissed her cheek and sent her back inside.

Teresita climbed the steps to her room. Huila looked at Tomás and Gabriela and put her finger to her lips. They crept back inside, and they whispered to the maids and the cooks to stop working and leave. They silenced the great house, and when night fell, they crept to bed early and whispered to each other, careful to keep their laughter quiet.

When Teresita awoke, they fed her great plates of food. She drank milk and tamarind juice. She ate steak and fried cactus, beans and potatoes boiled in chicken broth. Tortillas and cheese and crisp lettuce with lemon juice. Then Huila joined her and they ate pudding and cake.

Tomás said, “So! What did God tell you?”

They stared at him until he looked away.

He didn’t speak of her journey again.

Thirty-four

PERHAPS, DEEP IN HIS HEART, Tomás wanted no one to be wild if he himself could not run free. Even now, on many nights, he slept under the cottonwood, near a small fire, with his head on his saddle and nothing between his back and the hard Sonoran dirt but his thin blanket. When Gabriela called, of course, he was a fine gentleman, and he slept beside her in the soft ancient Urrea bed, smelling her delicate scents, her soapy hair. Listening to her soft little snores and sighs. He was particularly gentlemanly when he made his advances, which often began with a single flower plucked from Huila’s vines outside their house. A small flower and a little grin, and she would say either “Ay, Tomás” or “Mi Chiquito”—my little one. She rightly suspected that “Gordo” was not a name for love play.

And when he went to Alamos, a place becoming delightful to him in spite of his conversion to more feral ways, he was finer still. He squired Loreto as if he were her loyal husband. He wore his dark suits and his golden vests, drooped watch chains across his flat belly, and waxed his mustaches until they swept out and up, bold and heavy as any bandido’s. He traded his boots for gleaming flat shoes, which he always had polished on the corner near the church, and, on his sharpest days, he affected a cane with a silver nugget for a head.

There was no shortage of such ornaments, for Alamos was in the heart of silver country, and the Urrea mines were ripe with ore. Even after Tomás had sent Don Miguel his share of the profits, and after he had paid his miners, there were nuggets to spare. And gold. Santa María and Aquihuiquichi gave up crops of henequen and corn, and their cows formed considerable herds, which Segundo drove to Alamos and Guaymas and even to the American border, where Arizonans and Texans bid for them in Nogales and Tucson, even as far away as El Paso. Aguirre’s projects employed workers from each of the arroyo’s villages, and men from the Yaqui towns came to work. Logs were dragged from the hills; cut boards came from mills in Texas. Vast adobe works bristled near each of the small dams Aguirre designed.

Thus, in a few short years, Tomás had become powerful. Truly was he patrón, a man now, not a boy. He had his library. Thanks to Aguirre, he had water running in his white house. He had a fine life, and it would drone on exactly the way it was until he died. Little change. Few adventures. There would always be the dull excitements of a ranch, of course—storms and freezes, heat waves and droughts. Cattle would be rustled, coyotes would take baby goats. Men would be maimed and some would be killed, and difficult births would endanger fine mares, and the Indians in El Potrero would become restless or morose or demon haunted or ill. Loreto would have more babies. His Gaby, too, would have babies. Teresita, God forbid, would find a man and produce even more babies. But it would all seem, he already knew, as familiar as the face of his grandfather clock. Life would tick away, in circles, until he was kicked in the head by a mule, or lay back one last time in his feather bed, or was shot by a drunk vaquero in a dispute over his salary. It was all the same, always the same.

He often sighed, often sat and stared at the mysterious Sierra Madre to the east, wishing he could turn the whole operation back over to Aguirre. Wishing he could see the wild Tarahumara Indians, their fabled hundred-mile footraces—wishing for a bear, its raw pelt sour and stinking as it drooped over his pack mule—wishing for eagle feathers, lion attacks, a sighting of the red wolf, a gun battle. But Aguirre didn’t understand these urges. He constantly called for political action, the “true adventure” of revolution. Tomás could not make Aguirre see the terrible truth: should a revolution begin in Mexico, the peasants would come for them first. Urrea’s head and Aguirre’s head would be mounted on spikes to turn black together in the sun. Their eyes would feed the first crows of the revolt.

In Alamos, there were sophisticates and even artists, but he had sworn to Loreto that he would not embarrass her in her newfound society. No freethinker debates. No drinking. No lovers. In Alamos, he played the swell, taking her arm and strolling the Spanish-looking streets. It was all he could do to keep himself from shooting out the streetlights. No one in Alamos, even his wife—especially his wife—understood him. Father Gastélum seemed to find his thoughts seditious, if not satanic.

At Cabora, Segundo had drifted into his own small world; Aguirre, ever more certain that Díaz was hunting him, spent more and more time hidden in Texas. And Gabriela did not want to listen to talk of wildness, or war, or wandering. Gabriela had come into a fine home and a true love—she would not hear any of this wild talk of his.

Teresita was his companion. Sometimes, he spent entire days talking to her about Díaz, or ranching, or horses, or history. He had been angered, at first, that Aguirre and she were teaching Gaby to read. He still didn’t see what good it could do a female to enter the world in this fashion. Now, though, when he could argue with nobody about the latest poet or the latest newspaper scandal, he was growing more dependent on Teresita’s responses. She spent hours working her way through his library, and late at night, when Huila had brought him his slippers, and he had sipped his brandy, he would light his oil lamp and offer her an opening gambit, as if it were a game of chess. (Chess! He would have to teach her chess, as well.) He might say, “Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz . . . unfair to men, don’t you agree?” “Ay, Papá,” she’d gasp, heaving a long and exasperated woman’s sigh over the foolishness of her father. “How can you say that?” And they’d be off.

She scoffed at
Ivanhoe.
He turned to Marcus Aurelius and tried to best her when she championed the Psalms. Voltaire scandalized her, delighted him.

Now, if he could only get her to keep her Goddamned shoes on.

He hopped the rails of the corral, finding her in the stable, brushing her favorite roan stallion.

“Condenada!” he said.

For a man who did not believe in Hell, he condemned her to go there frequently.

Teresita giggled; she had realized by now that both Huila and Tomás showed affection for her by cussing.

“You stepped in horse shit,” he said.

“It wipes off.”

“Jesús,” Tomás said. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Catch me if you can,” she said, then grabbed the horse’s mane and swung herself up. “Fat Boy!”

Her skirts were indecently flung up over her hips.

“No!” he shouted, though he was already smiling, for this was yet another battle between them.

Teresita still insisted on riding like a man, straddling the horse with her knees obscenely open and clutching the flanks of the horse as she galloped insanely across the llano. Teresita didn’t even use a saddle, much less sit primly, sideways, with her knees held together.

Ladies didn’t gallop.

Ladies didn’t . . .
jump fences,
which is what she did every time she escaped him.

Leaning over the neck of the stallion, Teresita stormed through the madly wheeling horses in the corral. Her powerful mount exploded forward and she rode him into the air, seemingly ready to fly straight over the house like a hawk as they cleared the rails and sped away. Her petticoats were white in the sun.

Tomás ran out and stared down any of the cowboys who might be whistling their approval, or cheering her on.

“Imbeciles!” he snarled.

Then he snatched the reins of a horse away from the nearest vaquero and kicked open the gate and mounted the already trotting beast, one foot in the stirrup, one foot skipping, skipping, hopping in the dirt until he was aboard and racing after her, running so hard his hat left his head and circled in the wind before it fell in his wake.

The men watched and shook their heads, all of them in love with Teresita, and all of them knowing that no rider could catch her.

They blasted through the work crew in the arroyo. Aguirre fell on his rear in the dust, and a section of reed-and-stick frame fell over as the workers jumped out of the way of the raging horses.

“Cabrona!” Tomás bellowed at her. And on they charged, down the dry creek beds and up the arroyos, over small hills and into tattered and heat-wilted fruit trees. All around them, animals burst from the ground, fleeing from burrows or jumping for the brush or taking wing and exploding into the sun. Her skirt rose behind her like an indecent flag.

She slowed, then, until he caught up to her, but before he could admonish her, she surged ahead again, and he spurred his mount and tore down the serene valley beside her, their horses’ great chests surging in rhythm, their horses’ necks lying out straight before them, their mad eyes rolling white, and he began to laugh. Tomás laughed and laughed as they raced, Cabora now completely lost from sight, nothing before them but wild Sonora, and the bottomless sky above, father and daughter unleashed, growing smaller in the distance as their dust covered them, only the dirt smoke of their passing visible now, silent, vanishing, free upon the land.

Thirty-five

HER POWERS WERE GROWING NOW, like her body. No one knew where the strange things came from. Some said they sprang up in her after the desert sojourn with Huila. Some said they came from somewhere else, some deep inner landscape no one could touch. That they had been there all along.

Inside the shacks, Teresita and Huila always found the same scene: men outside, smoking and fretting, and women hunched inside, around the vivid centerpiece of the splayed mother, bulging huge and glistening in the firelight. Teresita prayed, she leaned forward and whispered. Teresita moved her hands in circles over the woman’s belly, circling in toward each other, then out, away from each other, swirling as she whispered, swirling, as if stirring water, as if she had reached into a bath and were mixing hot water and cold, stirring, her fingers suddenly bending as if she were pointing into the womb as she whispered, around and around. “Yes,” Teresita said. “Yes.” And the mother gasped and drew a long breath. “Oh!” she said, and then she laid her hands on herself, on her straining stomach, on her ribs. “Oh.” Teresita laid her hand over the mound of her belly and said, “The pain is gone?”

“Yes,” the mother said.

The mothers loved her. She was the holy secret of the women, and many daughters were christened Teresa on the plain. Soon, Teresita was in greater demand than Huila, and the old one was astounded to find herself relegated to filling in for the child, attending to births that Teresita had no time for as her schedule grew busier.

One hundred children came through the honey in the womb.

Outside of the birthing rooms, too, the People saw that she had learned many of Huila’s tricks. Teresita would stand still, connected to the earth, and she’d challenge the men to move her. “Come on, you weaklings!” she’d taunt them. The other girls of the ranch laughed and giggled around her, and the boys, getting big now and starting to want her, would sometimes join in the fray just so they could lay hands on her. Buenaventura would sneer at them all, scoff from a distance, unimpressed and angry that she got all the attention whenever she pleased.

“Move me if you can!” she challenged.

And Segundo would grab her around the waist and tug, and she wouldn’t move. Little Antonio Cuarto, Segundo’s nephew, grown up and stocky, but still shorter than she was, would join in and grab her around the hips, and together they’d shove and pull, but her feet would not even slide in the dirt. The watching children would laugh and clap and hoot and whistle until Segundo, red in the face, stepped away and offered his place to anyone who dared.

Millán pushed in and said, “I’ll move you!”

“Big man,” she taunted, laughing along with her girlfriends.

He moved close to her and put his hands on her breasts and shoved. She moved his hands away from her breasts. He put them on her ribs, then shoved again—she felt like a wooden beam. He bounced off her. Then he put his hands on her breasts again as he leaned in.

“Stop it,” she said into his ear.

He laughed, stepped away, spit. And in turn, they laughed at him, the girls taunting, twisting their fingers at him like little knives, chanting “Lero-lero-le-ro!” He shrugged.

All the cowboys remembered these games and the tales of the women, so when mules kicked them, or they split their nails with hammers, or were shot or stabbed, they came to Teresita like little boys seeking their mothers. It was still Huila who set broken bones and packed bullet holes with herbs, but it was now Teresita who looked in their eyes and murmured to them, passed a hand over their foreheads or their hearts, and made them sleepy and calm.

“Poor boys.” She’d smile. “They don’t like pain.”

“Boys!” Huila invariably spit. “What the devil do boys know of pain!”

The men clutched her hands and kissed them, so happy were they to be relieved of their aches. One day, she removed a terrible back pain from Señor Cantúa, and he went away happy, in a wagon, off to begin his shrimp stand beside the turquoise sea.

But there were people who were not amused. In confession, when Father Gastélum came and sat in the stables to greet them, some whispered of her heathen works, of her occult powers. One of her detractors was Buenaventura. Though no religious fanatic, he was appalled at her behavior. She romped with the Indian children, then sang filthy songs and common ballads to the slavering vaqueros. She rode her horses indecently, and she consorted with Gabriela, that intruder slut. If any woman should have lived in the main house of Cabora, it was his own mother. They should have sent for her, brought her from Ocoroni. Indeed, Teresita’s specially built wing of the house should have been his. The library should have been his. The cook girls and the maids and the bed-maker girls and the wash girls should have been his.

The other was Tomás.

He had indulged her indigenous interests, and her explorations with Huila. He felt it was only fair to allow her an education in her Indian ways. It was a reasonable complement to her studies in the library. Aguirre had taught her well. She could discuss politics better than most men in the llano. Tomás was proud of her.

But this other business, this strange kind of reverence some of them were showing for her. This was simply not acceptable. Her spiritualist parlor games, her unseemly roughhousing with the men, these things alarmed him deeply. The damned natives were ready to charge off after messiahs and seers at the drop of a hat. The Indians in the United States were rising again, the Apache would not be tamed, and full-out war with the Yaquis here in Mexico was ticking ever closer. All he needed was for Gastélum or some other whore of President Díaz to send word that Teresita fancied herself some sort of female messiah. She refused to understand that spies watched them from all sides. And she failed to accept the burden of being an Urrea. Teresita was too special to be dirtying her hands with babies, with herbs and foolish spells. He had started to imagine the ranch run by a woman. He had begun to see Teresita in his mind as the great patrona. Teresa Urrea, riding her stallion among hundreds of peones, regal as a queen. The first woman to command the vast holdings of the family. He could
see
it.

It could be done, even if it seemed unspeakable.

Lately, Tomás no longer rode the herds or the fence lines, no longer wrangled wild horses or broke ponies. He didn’t rule with a pistol or a whip or a stallion. Even Segundo had gone inside to work. No, Tomás ruled Cabora with a quill pen. He ran the herds and the cowboys and the grain harvest and the peones with ink—his pen, his ledger books, his abacus. Tomás tallied. And when numbers dictated a change in the work, he called in a hired hand and told him, and the needed change was accomplished. There were periods—days at a time—when Tomás did not feel the sun on his head. A woman, he thought, a woman could do this work. He smiled. A woman could probably do it better than he.

In his dreams, he could see himself set free. Riding home to his women from far journeys. Returning from a jaunt to San Francisco, in the company of Aguirre, perhaps even Segundo, and that gangly boy Buenaventura. His daughter the queen of Cabora awaiting him, his beloved little Gaby with an heir at her breast, and in the city, Loreto. He could smell it.

He did not believe the stories about Teresita, but he knew the People believed. She had somehow found a way to mesmerize them all. Now, if he could only turn her energies to ruling the ranch, instead of this Indian foolishness. He lay awake nights with the burden of his worry. He argued with Gabriela. He drank late into the night, staring into his glass.

Gabriela, as the new doña of the ranch, was not free to play with children or animals or young people. She was not free to ride wild with Teresita, or to swim in the stock ponds or the arroyo’s dammed lagunas. She was compelled to behave like a mother, a fine creature of a more tender and valuable weave than the rest of them. Often, as on this day, she was left in the courtyard to fan herself and sew, while Huila snored and snuffled in the shade of the plum tree. She did not fear Huila the way the others did, but she knew Huila would never tell her any secrets. Huila would never even teach her how to make a simple healing tea. Gabriela wanted to learn something more than good manners, corsets, stockings, place settings. One of the girls came out of the house and asked, “Missus? Would you care for chicken and rice soup, or potato soup?”

She wanted to curse, the way Tomás cursed, but such things were not allowed.

“Chicken soup,” she droned, “would be lovely.”

Outside the garden walls, Teresita’s voice rose—she was leading a group of children in some kind of chant.

Fina Félix and Teresita led a gang of kids in a race around the barn, then over one of the tumbledown fences. They jumped like horses, then galloped in circles. Buenaventura watched them, smirking. His back was to the barn wall, and his right knee was cocked, his boot heel jammed into a knothole behind him. He had learned to smoke. He hung a corn-shuck cigarette off his lip and blew smoke and said “Jesus Christ” to himself.

“Fucking savages,” Buenaventura mumbled.

He was supposed to be working, but to hell with work. His
sister
never worked. All she did was run around like an idiot with the little Indios, then rub them on their heads and mutter mumbo jumbo in their ears. He shook his head.

Teresita was teaching them some sort of Yaqui bullshit.

They chanted, and she led them.

“How cute,” he said.

She glanced at him.

“Indians on the warpath.”

She stopped singing with them.

“Hello, hermano,” she said.

Teresita was stung by the change in him. He had grown distant, then angry, and she didn’t know why. He frightened her sometimes.

He held two fingers up behind his head like feathers.

“Woo-woo!” he sang.

The children looked back and forth between them. Some of them laughed, but others looked down at the ground, unsure of what to do.

“Stop that,” Teresita said, trying a small smile on him.

He hopped on one foot.

“Woo-woo-woo! Heya-heya!”

“Buenaventura . . .”

Fina Félix had stopped laughing. She stood up, brushed her skirt off. “You’re just mean,” she said. “Mean and stupid.”

“And you’re fat,” he said.

“Stop it!” Teresita said.

He put his left hand over his head and made a fist with his right. He kicked up his feet as he mocked them, dancing in a circle, shouting, “I’m an Indian! I’m a Yaqui! Woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo!”

Teresita raised a hand toward him and shouted, “
Stop it!
”

And Buenaventura froze. His body locked in place. His left arm aimed at the sun, and the other clenched painfully before his heart, and his raised leg would not lower, and his other leg could not hold him. He fell over, caught in a horrible rictus, his face twisted in its hateful sneer. He squirmed on the ground, kicked, let out strangled cries. The children ran, shouting. Fina backed away from Teresita, her eyes wide and wild. Buenaventura, hard as a log, writhed on the ground in his seizure, spit foaming out of his open mouth. Teresita fell to her knees beside him.

“Oh my God!” she cried. “Oh my God! Buenaventura! What have I done?”

His eyes goggled at her, tears already falling from them as he tried to squirm away from her in terror. He rolled and kicked on the ground, his tongue lolling out. Grunting. Gargling.

“Get Huila!” Teresita screamed. “Get Huila now!”

Fina Félix ran to the house and stirred Huila from her sleep. Then she left the courtyard and kept running. She ran until she could slam shut the door of her own house and hide behind her bed.